![]() “This is the same band I used on ‘Harvest’” It’s unsurprising that the next music he’d make would veer towards a mood of quiet reflection. ![]() In a 1992 interview with Q magazine, Young explained how Harvest Moon became a sequel of sorts to Harvest. “Now that it’s created, it seems to be related to Harvest, but when I started work on it, I had no idea that it was gonna be like that,” he admitted. “The first thing I did was to finish a song called You And Me, which I’d started writing in 1975. Then I wrote a few more songs until I had enough to start thinking about doing a session. I began to figure out which musicians to use and once I’d written down the various names and started calling them, I realised, This is the same band I used on Harvest. So it was the songs which dictated who I played with. Intriguingly, Young had been performing a snippet of You And Me as early as 1971, along with working versions of Harvest songs – as heard on the Neil Young Archives Official Bootleg Series release Dorothy Chandler Pavilion 1971, where a few lines from You And Me act a prelude to I Am A Child.Įverybody was available it all happened real easy.” Luckily, there was no problem getting the guys together again. ![]() But, being Neil Young, he did what Neil Young does: change, again.Twenty years later, however, in its Harvest Moon incarnation, You And Me finds Young sounding haunted, singing ambiguous lyrics that seem to flit between an imagined past with the old flame who originally inspired the song and memories of his years with his then wife, Pegi.īack then, the nascent song shared the bittersweet feeling of one of the best Neil Young songs, After The Goldrush, in the way that it seemed to look back on a past relationship. It must’ve been nice, being on the edge of 50 and lionized by people half your age. At the time, Young was coming off some of the noisiest, most radical shows of Crazy Horse’s career (captured on Weld) and had been recast as the progenitor of a generation of underground bands like Nirvana and Sonic Youth-a distinction you couldn’t quite give to David Crosby, all due respect. The connection to Harvest is explicit, but the album also fits in a set of what you could call Gentle Neil: Comes a Time, Old Ways, Prairie Wind, Homegrown. The album’s most touching moment is on “Old King,” where, in the course of eulogizing a beloved dog, Young mentions having kicked him when he was bad: a moment of violence neutralized by time and made strangely beautiful by the fact that Young knows it won’t ever happen again. The effect is like looking at a hologram, or a trick image that changes when you tilt the card back and forth: The object is fixed, but what you see in it flickers-and both feel equally real. The poignancy isn’t just in the latter album’s tenderness-the string sections, the country lilt, the pedal steel guitar-but in the way that Young slips between past and present: how a memory of then becomes a vision of now (“Unknown Legend”), how circular time stirs feelings we think we’ve forgotten (“Harvest Moon”). So, while the feel of the albums is similar-gentle, plaintive, romantic-the experience is different: one, a catalog of romance according to youth, and the other according to the reflections of middle age. ![]() ![]() The same person, maybe, but separated by a Rubicon of experience. But Harvest was made by a recently divorced 26-year-old still negotiating his creative path, and Harvest Moon by a multiplatinum legend who’d secured the privilege of doing more or less whatever he wanted. One way to hear Harvest Moon is as an echo of 1972’s Harvest-a leap made easier by the fact that many of the same musicians played on both. ![]()
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